The Nautical Chart (39 page)

She had come to the stern and was pointing past the Navidad dock and the large twin concrete tunnels that formerly berthed submarines, to where the black El Espalmador beach was littered with the junk of boats cut up for scrap.

"That's the Graveyard of Ships With No Name."

El Piloto had turned toward Coy. He had a half smoked cigarette between his lips and was looking at him with eyes flooded with memories, on the verge of some emotion that he refrained from showing. On the shore, beyond rusted hulls partly sunk among frames, bridges, decks, and funnels, lay ships gutted like great hapless whales, their metal ribs and naked bulkheads exposed, their steel plates cut and stacked on the beach at the foot of the cranes. That was where ships sentenced to death, stripped of name, registration, and flag, made their last voyage before ending up under the blowtorch. City planners had fingered that graveyard for extinction, but it was taking months to finish scrapping and clearing away the junk that lay scattered on the beach. Coy saw an ancient bulk carrier of which there remained only the stern, half sunk in the sea, and whose fore two-thirds had already disappeared in the chaos of metal on the beach. There were dismantled parts everywhere—a dozen large anchors dripping rust onto the dark sand, three funnels absurdly saved and lined up in a row, the traces of paint in the colours of their owners still visible, and a little farther away, by a watchtower, the nearly hundred-year-old superstructure of the
Korzeniowski,
a Russian or Polish packet that had been there as long as Coy could remember. It had a rusted iron deck, once white, rotted planks, and a nearly intact bridge, where as a boy he had dreamed of feeling the movement of a ship beneath his feet and seeing open water before his eyes.

For many years that had been his favorite place, the site of ocean-going dreams as he walked along the breakwater with a fishing pole or harpoon and fins, or later when he was helping El Piloto scrape the hull of the
Carpanta,
tied up at El Espalmador in shallow water. There, in the endless dusks when the sun was starting to hide behind the inert skeletons of the junked ships, El Piloto and he had talked, with words or with silence, about their belief that ships and men should always end their days at sea, with dignity, and not as scrap ashore. And later, very far from there, on Deception Island, south of Cape Horn and the Drake Passage, Coy had experienced an identical state of mind when he stepped onto a sandy beach that was as black as this one, among thousands of bleaching whale bones as far as the eye could see. The sperm oil of those mammals had been burned in lamps long before Coy was born, but the bones were still there, like a mockery, in that strange Antarctic Sargasso. Among the remains was an ancient harpoon of rusted iron, and Coy found himself staring at it with repugnance. Deception Island was a good name for that place, after all. Whales cut up for scrap, ships cut up for scrap. Men cut up for scrap. The harpoon was embedded in one flesh, because the story was always the same.

THEY
tied up with other pleasure craft and walked along the quay, feeling, as one always does when first stepping onto land, that it was rocking slightly beneath their feet. At the commercial dock on the other side of the yacht club was a standard cargo ship, the
Felix von Luckner,
which belonged to Zeeland. Coy knew the ship because of his familiarity with the Cartagena-Antwerp route. Just seeing her evoked long hours of waiting in the rain, wind, and yellow fight of winter, with the phantasmagorical silhouettes of the cranes rising from the flat land, the Escalda River, and the interrninable waiting to enter the locks. Even though he had known much more pleasant corners of the world, Coy couldn't help feeling a stab of nostalgia.

The three of them went to the terrace of the Valencia bar, which was near the hundred-year-old tile featuring the verses Miguel de Cervantes had dedicated to the city in his
Viaje del Parnaso.
The tile was mounted at the foot of a wall constructed by Charles in when the
Dei Gloria
had been at the bottom of the sea only three years. There they drank big pitchers of cold beer, enjoying the view of the clock in the town hall, palm trees rustling in the freshening midday
leheche,
and the monument to sailors killed in Cuba and Cavite. Dozens of names were engraved on its marble plaques, along with the names of ships that like the sailors had been in the silence of the deep for a hundred years. Afterward, El Piloto went to see about the sounding equipment, and Tanger walked with Coy through the narrow, deserted streets of the old city, beneath balconies with pots of geraniums and sweet basil and past porches where occasionally a woman with her embroidery in her hands watched them with curiosity. Most of the balconies were closed and the sunporches stripped of curtains. There were whole houses with condemned windows and doors growing grimy with disuse. Coy searched vainly for a familiar, face, a familiar tune filtering through green shutters, a child playing on the corner or in the next plaza, where he might recognize someone or be recognized himself.

"I
was happy here," he said suddenly.

They had stopped on a dark street before the rubble of a house wedged between two others that remained standing. Strips of wallpaper dangled from the walls. Rusty nails that once held picture frames, a shattered table leg, and frayed electric cords told the story. Coy's eyes took it all in, trying to recapture what he remembered— bookshelves, mahogany and walnut furniture, tiled hallways, rooms with oval skylights on the upper floors, yellowed photographs encircled by a whitish aura that intensified their ghostly air. The clock repair shop was gone from the ground floor, as were the coal merchants and the grocers at the end of the street, and even the tavern with the marble fountain in the center and ads for Anis del Mono and bullfight posters on the walls. Now there were only memories of the sharp tang of wine as he walked past the door and saw the backs of taciturn men at the counter, bent over glasses filled with red light, whiling away the hours. The boy in short pants who had walked down that same street with a siphon bottle in each hand, and pressed his nose, enchanted, to the lighted shop windows filled with toys for Christmas, had long ago been borne away by the sea. "Why did you leave?" Tanger asked.

Her voice sounded extremely sweet. Coy kept staring at the walls of the ruined house. He nodded over his shoulder, in the direction of the port at the other side of the city.

"There was a road there." He turned slowly. "I wanted to do what others only dream of."

She bowed her head in a sign of understanding. She was studying him in the unique way she sometimes had, as if seeing him for the first time.

"You went a long way," she whispered.

She seemed to envy him as she said that. Coy shrugged, with a smile that held time and shipwrecks. A deliberate, self-conscious grimace.

"There's something I read," he said, and then again looked at that shell of a house. 'A page I read upstairs in that house."

He recited it, remembering without difficulty.

"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life which... is more oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling."

He shrugged again when he finished, and she kept looking at him the same way The navy-blue eyes were focused on his lips.

"You were what you wanted to be," she said.

Her voice was still a pensive whisper. Coy turned up the palms of his hands.

"I was Jim Hawkins, then I was Ishmael, and for a while I even thought I was Lord Jim— Later I learned that I was never any of them. That relieved me in a certain way. Like being freed of some annoying friends. Or witnesses."

He gave one last look at the bare walls. Dark shadows waved to him from upstairs—women in mourning talking in the waning light of late afternoon, an oil lamp before the figure of the Virgin, the soothing dick of bobbins making lace, a black leather trunk with silver initials, and the aroma of tobacco on a white mustache. Engravings of ships under full sail among the crisp pages of a book. I fled, he thought, to a place that no longer existed from a place that no longer exists today. Again he smiled, at emptiness.

'As El Piloto is known to say, never dream with a hand on the wheel."

Tanger had said nothing after hearing that, and said nothing now. She had taken out the pack bearing the likeness of Hero and slowly lit a cigarette, holding the box in her hands, as if that bit of colored cardboard consoled her for her own ghosts.

THEY
ate
michirones
and fried eggs and potatoes in the Posada de Jamaica, on the far side of the old calle Canales tunnel. El Piloto joined them there, his hands stained with grease, and said that the sounding equipment was installed and was working well. There was a hum of conversation, tobacco smoke collecting in gray strata beneath the ceiling, and in the background, on the radio, Rodo Jurado was singing,
"La Lola se va a los puertos."
The old eating house had been refurbished, and instead of the oildoth table coverings Coy remembered from a lifetime ago, there was now new linen and cutlery, as well as tiles, decorations, and even paintings on the walls. The clientele was the same, especially at noon—people from the neighborhood, stonemasons, mechanics from a nearby repair shop, and retirees drawn by the family-style, reasonably priced meals. At any rate, as he told Tanger, serving her more Sangria, the name of the place alone made it worth coming.

As El Piloto peeled a mandarin for dessert, they worked out the search plan. They would cast off early the next morning so they could begin to comb the zone by mid-morning. The initial search sector would be established between 1°20' and 1°22' W and 37°31.5' and 37°32.5'N. They would start on the outside of that one-mile-long, two-mile-wide rectangle, working from deepest to shallowest in decreasing soundings, beginning with one hundred sixty-five feet. As Coy pointed out, starting farther off the coast meant it would take longer, as they gradually came closer to land, for the
Carpanta's
movements to be noticed. At a speed of two or three knots, the Pathfinder would allow them to make detailed soundings of parallel tracks some one hundred sixty-five to two hundred feet in width. The area of exploration would be divided into seventy-four of those tracks, so that, counting the time lost in maneuvering, it would take an hour to run each one, and dghty to cover the complete area. That placed the hours of real work time at about a hundred or a hundred and twenty, and they would need ten or twelve days to cover the search area. If and as weather allowed.

"The forecast looks good," said El Piloto. "But I figure we'll lose a few days."

"Two weeks," Coy calculated. 'At a minimum."

"Maybe three."

"Maybe."

Tanger was listening attentively, elbows on the table and fingers under her chin.

"You said we would attract attention from land— Would that raise suspicions?"

'At first, I don't think so. But as we work our way closer, maybe. This time of year people are already coming to the beach."

"There are also fishing boats," El Piloto pointed out, with a segment of mandarin in his mouth. 'And Mazarr6n's pretty close."

Tanger looked at Coy. She had picked up a piece of peel from El Piloto's plate and was tearing it into little pieces. The aroma perfumed the table. "Is there some way we can justify what we're doing?"

"I suppose so. We can be fishing, or looking for something we've lost."

'A motor," El Piloto suggested.

"That's it. An outboard motor that dropped off. It's to our advantage that El Piloto and the
Carpanta
are well known in the

area, and don't attract much attention_________ As for what happens

ashore, that won't present any problems. We can tie up one night in Mazarr6n, another in Aguilas, sometimes in Cartagena, and the rest of the time drop anchor outside the area. There's nothing strange about a couple renting a boat for two weeks of vacation."

He was joking when he said that, but Tanger didn't seem to find it amusing. Or maybe it was the word "couple." She tilted her head, the mandarin peel still in her hands, considering the situation.

'Are there patrol boats?" she asked without emotion.

"Two," El Piloto answered. "Customs and the Guardia Civil."

Coy explained that the Customs HJ generally operated at night, and concentrated on contraband. They didn't need to worry about them. As for the Guardia, their assignment was to watch the coast and enforce the laws regarding fishing. The
Carpanta
wasn't their affair in principle, but there was always the possibility that when they saw them there day after day, they'd come and nose around.

"The good thing is that El Piloto knows everyone, including the Guardias. Things have changed now, but when he was young he worked with some of them a little. You can imagine—blond tobacco, liquor, a percentage of the profits." He looked at El Piloto with affection. "He always found a way to make a living."

El Piloto made a fatalistic and wise gesture, ancient as the sea he sailed, the heritage of countless generations of adverse winds.

"Live and let live," he said simply.

Coy had accompanied him once or twice in those days, taking on the role of cabin boy in clandestine nocturnal outings near Cabo Tinoso or over toward Cabo de Palos, and he remembered the episodes with the excitement appropriate to his youth. In the dark, waiting for lights from a slowing merchant ship that stopped just long enough to lower a couple of bales to the deck of the
Carpanta.
Boxes of American tobacco, botdes of whiskey, Japanese electronics. Then the return trip in the black of night, maybe unloading the smuggled goods in a quiet cove, transferring it to the hands of shadows that waded out in water up to the chest. For the boy Coy was then, there was no difference between that and what he'd read, which was enough to justify the adventure. From his point of view, those pages of
Moonfleet
and
David Balfour
and
The Golden Arrow
and all the others—waiting for a burst of gunfire in the dark remained for a long time his deepest yearning—were pretext enough. The fact was that later, when they got back to port and threw an innocent line to be tied to the bollard, there was always a Guardia Civil or minor coast guard official waiting to collect the lion's share. After paying the bribe, what was left for El Piloto, after risking his boat and his freedom, was barely enough to get him to the end of the month. Live and let live. But there's always someone who's living better than you are. Or at the cost of others. Once, in the Taibilla bar, as they were eating
bocadillos,
someone took El Piloto aside and proposed a more involved venture, going out on a moonless night to meet a fishing boat coming from Morocco. Pure Ketama, he said. One hundred pounds. And that, the guy explained in a low voice, would earn a thousand times what El Piloto got from his little night excursions. From their table, sandwich in hand, Coy watched El Piloto listen carefully. Then he finished his beer and casually set the empty glass on the counter before punching the man all the way to the door and throwing him out on calle Mayor.